Today's high-stakes tests are inadequate tools for measuring the kinds of skills students will need for success in the global, technology-driven workplace, according to a group of key business and education leaders. The group, called the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), has issued a new report calling on national and state policy makers to ratchet up efforts to design and implement new assessments that can effectively measure these skills.

P21's new report, "The Assessment of 21st Century Skills: The Current Landscape," highlights progress in the United States and abroad toward developing the "means to measure complex, higher-order thinking skills." The report is accompanied by a new online tool designed to help assess these skills.

The report also notes that educational institutions around the world are only just beginning to create such assessments. But researchers point to examples they consider representative of the best testing models for information and communication technology (ICT) learning skills.

Chief among these is the Key Stage 3 (ages 12-13) ICT Literary Assessment developed by the British government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).

The British online examination was among the tests that received the highest praise from P21 researchers. They found the test to "represent a sophisticated new approach to combining assessment of content-area and thinking skills, and to building assessments that can provide both national data on students' capabilities and information on individual students pertinent to classroom-level instruction."

The test assesses ICT skills, as well as students' ability to use those skills to solve complex problems involving "research, communication, information management, and presentation." Researchers offered an example in which students were asked to write and publish a journalistic article examining the ethnic diversity of a small town's police force and teachers. For the assessment, students collect and analyze employment data, eMail sources for permission to publish information, and present the data in graphic and written form. Students use search engines, navigate web-based information sources, exchange eMail with information sources, and employ spreadsheets, word processors, and presentation software to study and present research.

The QCA test uses a "responsive assessment engine" to track and respond to performance on both technical and problem-solving skills throughout the assessment. The computer tracks students' actions and then maps them against capabilities they are expected to demonstrate at each level of the national curriculum.

"Student scores are based on their performance in these areas, as well as their demonstrated level of technical skills, and the test engine's final output includes not only a numerical score ... but a detailed profile of the test-taker's performance and areas for potential improvement," the study finds. It says these qualities make the QCA test "useful not only for ranking students, but for providing them with targeted instruction for the future."